My laptop has a US keyboard, and I need to write some French, with accents.

I know there's a painful way to do it with combinations of the alt key and the ascii codealt-codes, but I was wondering if there was an easier way to do it.

PS: Since the question is closed (but the answers no great) I thought I'd add this addendum. Basically, you need to set the keyboard to US International and then you can do accents using 'e or 'a; see this link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/97738

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Not germane to your question since you're talking about Windows, but Apple's default behavior in iOS (and the latest version of OS X) is to show the various accent forms when you hold down a letter (e.g. "e" offers me è,é,ê,ë,ē,ė, and ę). A nice convenience feature (which I turn off because I usually need character repeat more often than accents :P)
– voretaq7Nov 16 '12 at 21:41

Someone once told me they were able to get accents by using type single-quote in combination with the letter: 'e, "e, and 'a would produce the respective letters with an accent. You know anything about that?
– frenchieNov 13 '12 at 9:21

Do US keyboards have AltGr? (I'm on a UK keyboard.) I can type áéíóú by pressing AltGr+(aeiou). And as a bonus, the Euro symbol (€) is on the 4 key. I was wondering what the AltGr key did only this morning!